City: Habitat or Human Zoo?

Abstract

The article presents a phenomenological understanding of the city by addressing two theoretical approaches to achieve a clarifying description of its contemporary version. On the one hand, it considers ideas that refers to the city as a human habitat in which polite discourtesy, competitive cooperation and instrumental relationships rule. These are the result of the biotic development sublimated in social organization and culture. According to such ideas, the city might be understood as a product of the human nature or, if preferred, the highest expression of the human as a natural-cultural being. On the other hand, it considers the understanding of the city as a great human zoo in which individualism, anxiety, boredom, stress, repression and tension coexist; because of the latter, citizens are, increasingly, in danger of becoming insane. By analyzing both perspectives, the city reveals itself as a field of interactions of the human animal. Such interactions are characterized by fierce competition; and fragmented, selfish, intermittent, microscopic, brief and liquid relationships that are based on heterogeneity, hybridization and a game of masks that takes place in different micro-events. Those interactions are also based on the establishment of some rules that guarantee the minimum for coexistence among a group of unknown people that struggle for surviving and maintaining their representations of reality.